Maebara Keiichi hasn’t lived in the small rural town of Hinamizawa for long, but he’s stayed long enough to realize that there is something very wrong with the place. Every year around the time of the town’s Watanagashi Festival, people are murdered and “spirited away,” and Keiichi is inevitably drawn into the string of events by his friends. The orphaned Satoko has lost her entire family to these strange occurrences, and she might be next; the young shrine maiden Rika seems to know more about the murders than she lets on; Mion is the future head of a cultish family connected to the killings; and Rena has a history of violent behavior that just might make the course of events end in tragedy. Is there a way to survive Hinamizawa’s curse?

Nakahito is a prepubescent Onmyou mystic-in-training who, due to some urging by the local punks, wanders into an abandoned lab. There, he accidentally awakens the bubbly android Kurumi with a kiss and is suddenly subjected to an energetic, pink-haired android calling him “master”, glomping him, and trying to do everything for him, no matter how major or minor the task. However, the military had special plans for Kurumi, and they want her back.

Surgeon Ando Mitsuo is drawn into the mysterious events surrounding his old friend Takayama Ryuji’s gruesome death when he finds a slip of paper with numbers written on it lodged inside Ryuji’s stomach during his autopsy. Using the code they created in college, the numbers on the paper spells out “RING.E As Mitsuo looks into the details of Ryuji’s untimely demise, he finds a connection to the famous urban legend about a video that causes people to die seven days after they’ve watched it. Now he’s compelled to discover the mystery surrounding the video and the real reason that it leads its viewers to such horrible deaths.

In a post-apocalyptic future, the last strains of humanity live scattered on great ships that float above the Sakai, the Great Sand Sea. Zizi, a young girl with the power to see inside of the Sakai, is protected from the harsh terrain around her by the tribe that raised her until she makes the mistake of harpooning a pregnant whale, thus bringing the wrath of its mate onto the island. To prevent the island from suffering from her misdeed, she joins pirate captain Suv and his crew and goes to search for her true origin – but what she finds may be more than she bargained for.

In a futuristic desert landscape where the local king has access to the only source remaining, water is expensive and scarce. Even Beelzebub, prince of demons, isn’t beyond robbing delivery trucks to get a fair share of the valuable liquid. One day, an old sheriff named Rao comes to the gates of the city of demons to ask for assistance from some powerful demons to search for the “Phantom Lake,” which he believes is hidden somewhere in the desert. Beelzebub and Thief agree to join Rao to search for it and they “borrow” an army tank to aid them on their perilous trek. But why is the King’s Army so frantic to keep the newfound friends away from this presumably unknown water source?

Aso Kira, a shy artist, first speaks to womanizing motorcyclist Kashino Rei when he asks directions to a nearby hospital to visit his injured friend. She soon becomes intrigued by him and his peculiar life and asks him to model for her drawings. As Kira and Rei fall in love and become closer, both are forced to face major obstacles and finally clean out the skeletons in their respective closets.

Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu are summoned once again to the magical land of Cephiro to find it barren and near death with the entire human population living within a gigantic castle, the only place where anything can survive. The cause of this travesty is the death of the Pillar, Princess Emeraude; to keep Cephiro from disappearing altogether, the Magic Knights must work together again to find a new Pillar of Cephiro. But what are all of those foreigners doing there and why are they fighting for the position of new Pillar of Cephiro?

When 8th graders Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu meet for the first time at Tokyo Tower during separate field trips, they are pulled into the mysterious, fantastic world of Cephiro, where the power of will controls everything. There, they are told they must save Princess Emeraude, the pillar of this world, from the clutches of the evil Head Priest Zagato to save Cephiro and get back home.

Kurosaki Guy is a member of the crime-abolishing police force S.T.A.D. to avenge the death of his older brother, Joe. Rashomon Emi is a beautiful, busty, deadly freelance bounty hunter who hunts and mangles her targets for fun and profit and has become the bane of S.T.A.D. When Emi moves in next door to Guy, they decide to overlook their differences and work together to foil the plans of Megalith, Tokyo's most dangerous terrorist organization. As they fight kooky villains and make new allies, Guy starts to fall for Emi and they get closer to meeting the leader of Megalith, the feared Zayin.

Anyway, Djudge, taking a moment from my hiatus here to give all you readers here at AS a small peek of what happened, through my perspective, at FanimeCon 2004, one of the largest conventions right here on the West Coast and in the U.S. for that matter. This year's event was spread out over four days and spanned a good part of the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, the adjacent San Jose Hilton....